Stay Relevant with Geo-Data While Engaging Consumers

Engaging mobile consumers requires putting them in control and having highly targeted messages to ensure relevancy. Anything less is an unwelcome interruption in their daily lives. Urban Airship has championed a best practices approach to mobile messaging and engagement called Good Push, and most recently partnered with Maponics to bring even greater location context to push messaging.

The world is constantly changing, and in order to make sure that mobile messages are focused towards the right customers, the spatial data guiding those messages must be kept up to date. This is one of the primary complexities of geospatial data: it is constantly in flux.

The city of Frisco, TX is a good example of this, with its population going from a few thousand to over a hundred thousand in just 15 years. You can imagine how that might change the neighborhoods or school zones in the area.

Not only can population growth change within geography, but perceptions of an area can change as well, both on the physical level and the collective awareness level. A good example of this is LA Live in downtown Los Angeles. For many years downtown was a ghost town after 7:00 PM. Through extensive efforts of city planners, the area now has a vibrant night life with many restaurants, bars & clubs centrally located near the Staples Center. This alters the perception of the area for people that are local, as well as people who are traveling to the city. Maponics monitors these types of changes to the area and modifies their polygons accordingly.

These types of changes happen continually and on much smaller levels as well. If a series of industrial plants close down in a borough of New York, all of a sudden the large open buildings become ideal studio workplaces for startup tech companies. Before long the entire neighborhood grows into a vibrant, populated area with its boundaries pushing outwards as more people move there.

Incorporating geospatial data for timely and precisely targeted messages to mobile users can create new and exceptional experiences. Particularly in the unique way Urban Airship utilizes Maponics’ geofences—storing these real-world boundaries for opted-in users’ current location and their location histories. An example of this could be sending special concession offers to mobile users within an amusement park, while sending discounted entrance-fee messages to users that are outside nearby and special vacation packages to those in outlying regions that were there in the past eight months, but not the most recent three months.

Being able to build segments for messaging based on where people are and where they’ve been throughout the world enables mobile messaging to attain new levels of precision never available before. And as Urban Airship knows, push messaging is a very delicate tool. When the targeting is accurate the results trump e-mail or untargeted marketing several times over. This is why Maponics is continuously updating our geofence boundaries, ensuring that our data correctly represents the reality that customers are living in.

Cory is a Senior Developer and member of the technical team at Maponics, specializing in complex data relationship problems.